Sarris, Andrew The Auteur Theory

The Auteur Theory and the Perils of Pauline

STOR

Andrew Sarris

Film Quarterly , Vol. 16, No. 4. (Summer, 1963), pp. 26-33.

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26

ANDREW SARINS

The Auteur Theory

And The Perils Of Pauline

Pauline KaeVs article “ Circles and Squares” in our last issue ,
was a blistering attack on the “ auteur ” school of criticism as it has been
seen in the work of Andrew Sarris and such journals as “Movie” and the “New York
Film Bulletin .” Mr. Sarris has sent us the following article
as his reply. Since Miss KaeVs views held the floor for a quarter , we will
allow Mr. Sarris the same time; in the subsequent issue they may both wish
to make some brief closing comments , as will the editor.

“Be sure that you go to the author to get at his
meaning, not to find yours."

—John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies

“I call these sketches Shadowgraphs, partly by the
designation to remind you at once that they derive
from the darker side of life, partly because like other
shadowgraphs they are not directly visible. When I
take a shadowgraph in my hand, it makes no impres-
sion on me, and gives me no clear conception of it.
Only when I hold it up opposite the wall, and now
look not directly at it, but at that which appears on
the wall, am I able to see it. So also with the
picture which I wish to show here, an inward picture
which does not become perceptible until I see it
through the external. This external is perhaps quite
unobtrusive but not until I look through it, do I dis-
cover that inner picture which I desire to show you,
an inner picture too delicately drawn to be outwardly
visible, woven as it is of the tenderest moods of the
soul.”

— Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or

I. THE AUTEUR THEORY

Certain misconceptions about the auteur
theory which have crept into the pages of
Film Quarterly now seem to be treated as
gospel by critics West of the Rockies. In the
Spring, 1963, issue, for example, Ernest Callen-
bach sums up the critical ferment of a decade:
“In 1957, in the Paris monthly Cahiers du
Cinema, Francis Truffaut proposed for the

magazine a ‘politique des auteurs’— a policy of
focusing criticism primarily upon directors and
specifically upon chosen directors whose indi-
viduality of style qualified them, in the eyes
of the Cahiers team, as ‘auteurs’— creators in
the personal sense we accept for the other arts.”
Thus far, I would criticize only one minor
chronological discrepancy. Francis Truffaut
first promulgated the “politique des auteurs,”
not in 1957, but in the January, 1954, issue of
Cahiers with an article entitled: “Une certaine
tendance du cinema frangais” “Du cinema
frangais,” it might be noted, not du cinema
american. Consequently, Callenbach is guilty
of a grave distortion when he makes the patron-
izing statement: “In its homeland the politique
has led to many peculiar judgments, especially
of American film-makers: it is Samuel Fuller,
Nicholas Ray, and Otto Preminger who figure
as the gods of this new pantheon.” A pantheon
with only three pillars is an idiot’s pantheon,
indeed. In his quick Cook’s tour, or shall we say
Roud's romp, through the pages of Cahiers du
Cinema, Mr. Callenbach has overlooked such
pantheon gods as Robert Bresson, Luis Bunuel,
Charles Chaplin, Jean Cocteau, Alexander Dov-
jenko, Carl Dreyer, Sergei Eisenstein, Robert

THE AUTEUR THEORY

27

Flaherty, D. W. Griffith, Howard Hawks, Al-
fred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, Kenji Mizoguchi,
F. W. Mumau, Max Ophuls, Jean Renoir,
Roberto Rossellini, Josef von Sternberg, Erich
Von Stroheim, Jean Vigo, and Orson Welles.

Here are some hard facts for the bemused
critics and the possibly misled readers of Film
Quarterly: In 1958, die Cahiers critics listed
the twelve greatest films of all time in terms of
their pantheon of directors— Mumau's Sunrise,
Renoir's Rules of the Game, Rossellini's Strang-
ers, Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, Griffiths
Birth of a Nation, Welles' Arkadin, Dreyer's
Ordet, Mizoguchi's Ugetsu, Vigo's L’Atalante,
Von Stroheim's The Wedding March, Hitch-
cock's Under Capricorn, Chaplin's Monsieur
Verdoux. That same year, Truffaut listed the
ten greatest living directors as: Chaplin, Re-
noir, Dreyer, Rossellini, Hitchcock, Sternberg,
Bunuel, Bresson, Gance, Lang. It seems strange
that Callenbach’s pantheon gods— Fuller, Ray,
Preminger— fail to appear in these lists. I am
certainly not arguing that these three directors
have not been favorably reviewed in Cahiers.
They have, and with good reason. What I find
intolerable in Film Quarterly is the persistent
distortion of opposing critical viewpoints. It is
too easy to dismiss a system of critical values
involving hundreds of directors by harping on
the two or three you happen to find “peculiar.”
It is also irresponsible for a magazine ostensi-
bly devoted to “film scholarship” to create the
impression that every critic and contributor to
Cahiers, Movie, Film Culture, and The New
York Film Bulletin follows the same “line” and
shares the same aesthetic theory. I am now
writing for Film Quarterly. Do I therefore fol-
low the Film Quarterly “line”? I should hope
not.

Perhaps, taste is a function of scale. To take
a specific example, the Spring 1962, Film Quar-
terly was designated “A Special Issue on
Hollywood.” The cover consists of a rear-view
still from Kent Mackenzie’s Exiles, complete
with garbage cans. After this unappetizing be-
ginning, the magazine gets rolling with a holier-
than-thou editorial: “Turn on! Turn On!”— a

West Coast sequel to Lindsay Anderson’s
“Stand Up!” Next we are treated to a “discus-
sion” entitled with suitable pomposity: “Per-
sonal Creation in Hollywood— Is It Possible?”
The panel consists of those renowned authori-
ties on personal creation: Fred Zinnemann,
John Houseman, Gavin Lambert, Irvin Kersh-
ner, Kent Mackenzie, Pauline Kael, and Colin
Young. Arthur Knight pops up with a puff on
“The New Hollywood Museum,” an institution
designed to be less useful than comparable
institutions in New York, London, and Paris.
Albert Johnson interviews Hubert Cornfield
and Paul Wendkos, and manages to provide his
readers with some new information, a rare
event in Film Quarterly. William Pechter ^
analysis of Abraham Polonsky's career is simi-
larly constructive. Joseph Anderson rounds out
the article section with a comparison of Kuro-
sawa's Seven Samurai and John Sturges’ The
Magnificent Seven, an ambivalent comparison
to say the least. Anderson on Kurosawa and
imitator John Sturges: “In this instance many
significant changes stem from traditional Holly-
wood ways of seeing things, and comparing
The Magnificent Seven with Kurosawa’s film
reveals some of the fixed ideas which inhibit
American film-making.” Anderson on John
Ford and imitator Kurosawa: “Yet Kurosawa’s
self-acknowledged debt to the American West-
ern, particularly John Ford’s, helped to deter-
mine the shape of The Seven Samurai. This
foreign influence has nourished him. Without
the American cinema, there would be no Kuro-
sawa.” In the pages of Film Quarterly, that is
about all the American cinema is good for: to
nourish Kurosawa and the other gods of the
espresso pantheon. Notice that Kurosawa’s
debt to Ford is “self -acknowledged.” If Kuro-
sawa had not given the show away, would
Ford’s influence be mentioned at all in Film
Quarterly? I doubt it. The remainder of this
pathetic “Hollywood Issue” is devoted to the
usual quota of film reviews (three) and “en-
tertainments” reviews (ten). No filmographies.
No research articles. Not even the kind of fun
pieces which a subject like Hollywood might

28

THE AUTEUR THEORY

be expected to inspire in the dreariest academi-
cians. Nothing, in fact, but faith, hope, and
exhortation.

By contrast, the December, 1955, American
issue of Cahiers du Cinema contains articles by
Max Ophuls ( Hollywood , petite tie), Eric Roh-
mer (Redecouvrir V Amerique), Jacques Rivette
(Notes sur une revolution), Andre Bazin (Evo-
lution du Western), Claude Chabrol (Evolution
du film policier), Jean Domarchi (Evolution du
film musical), Pierre Kast (Thousand and
Three), Henri Mercillon (Oil en est I’economie
du cinema americain?), Aldrian Scott (History
of the Black List), Harry Purvis (Memento du
dialoguiste holly woodien). The issue’s piece de
resistance is a dictionary of (then) contempo-
rary American directors— sixty in detail, one
hundred and fifty in all, with photographs,
biographical and filmographical data, and criti-
cal judgments of their careers. The sixty are:
Robert Aldrich, Laslo Benedek, John Berry,
John Brahm, Richard Brooks, Frank Capra,
Charles Chaplin, George Cukor, Michael Cur-
tiz, Jules Dassin, Cecil B. DeMille, Edward
Dmytryk, Allan Dwan, Richard Fleischer, John
Ford, Samuel Fuller, Tay Garnett, Edmund
Goulding, Henry Hathaway, Howard Hawks,
Stuart Heisler, Alfred Hitchcock, John Huston,
Elia Kazan, Gene Kelly, Henry King, Henry
Koster, Fritz Lang, Mitchell Leisen, Joseph
Losey, Leo McCarey, Joseph L. Mankiewicz,
Anthony Mann, Lewis Milestone, Vincente
Minnelli, Robert Montgomery, Arch Oboler,
Joseph Pevney, Otto Preminger, Richard Quine,
Nicholas Ray, Mark Robson, Robert Rossen,
Robert Siodmak, Douglas Sirk, Josef von Stern-
berg, George Stevens, John Sturges, Preston
Sturges, Jacques Tourneur, Edgar G. Ulmer,
King Vidor, Raoul Walsh, Charles Walters,
Orson Welles, William Wellman, Billy Wilder,
Robert Wise, William Wyler, and Fred Zinne-
mann. There are more directors in heaven and
earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in Film
Quarterly’s philosophy. Oh yes, the cover— a
front view of Marilyn Monroe, no less, in the
skirt-blowing sequence from The Seven Year
Itch. Looking at these two Hollywood issues

side by side, front to rear, the disinterested
observer would have to concede every advan-
tage of taste, scholarship, and perception to
Cahiers du Cinema. The difference between
Film Quarterly’s view of Hollywood and Ca-
hiers’ is the difference between plain subtraction
and differential calculus. If the editors and
critics of Film Quarterly want to cut the cin-
ema down to size, even midget size, that is
their privilege, but then there is no reason for
a debate. People who think that only ten films
a year are worth seeing will hardly be inter-
ested in value judgments concerning hundreds.

My defense of the auteur theory is therefore
a defense in depth. What I have argued in one
context after another for the past two years is
simply that the auteur theory is the most effi-
cient method of classifying the cinema: past,
present and future. However, the auteur theory
was never intended as an occult ritual. As I
stated in my “Notes on the Auteur Theory in
1962” (Film Culture, Winter 1962/3) : “Unfor-
tunatly, some critics have embraced the auteur
theory as a short-cut to film scholarship. With
a ‘y°u-see_ff_or-you-don’t’ attitude toward the
reader, the particularly lazy auteur critic can
save himself the drudgery of communication
and explanation. Indeed, at their worst, auteur
critiques are less meaningful than the straight-
forward plot reviews which pass for criticism
in America. Without the necessary research
and analysis, the auteur theory can degenerate
into the kind of snobbish racket which is asso-
ciated with the merchandising of paintings.”

Research and analysis are indispensable for
sound auteur criticism. Whether you are com-
mitted to Ray, Nicholas, or Ray, Satyajit, you
have to see all their work before you can be
authoritative on any one of their films. After a
given number of films, a pattern is established,
and we can speak of the Rays, of Ophuls, Re-
noir, Mizoguchi, Hitchcock, Chaplin, Ford,
Welles, Dreyer, Rossellini, Murnau, Griffith,
Sternberg, Eisenstein, Stroheim, Bunuel, Bres-
son, Hawks, Lang, Flaherty, Vigo, as we speak
of artists and authors in other media. Because
the auteur theory itself is a pattern theory in

THE AUTEUR THEORY

29

constant flux, I would never endorse a Ptole-
maic constellation of directors in a fixed orbit.
Only after thousands of films have been reval-
uated, will any personal pantheon have a
reasonably objective validity. The task of vali-
dating the auteur theory is an enormous one,
and the end will never be in sight. Meanwhile,
the auteur habit of collecting random films in
directorial bundles will serve posterity with at
least a tentative classification.

A debate over the auteur theory should be
concerned with nuances rather than extremes.
There is nothing new or revolutionary about
studying the cinema through its directors. Even
the socially conscious film histories of the
Rotha - Griffith - Lindgren - Jacobs - Kracauef-
Sadoul-Aristarco-Knight syndicate manage to
recognize the role of the director in certain
periods and locales, mainly long ago and far
away. Where I part company with these emi-
nent gentlemen is in my conception of film
history in terms of the career spans of directors.

I made my position clear in the Spring,
1962, issue of Film Culture:

“The chronological division of the cinema
into historical periods tends to perpetuate what
may be called the pyramid fallacy of many film
historians. This fallacy consists of viewing the
history of pinema as a process by which ap-
proved artisans have deposited their slabs of
celluloid on a single pyramid rising ultimately
to a single apex, be it Realism, Humanism,
Marxism, Journalism, Abstractionism, or even
Eroticism. Directors are valued primarily for
their ‘contributions’ to the evolution of a Uto-
pian cinema efficiently adjusted to a Utopian
society. Once a formal contribution has been
made, subsequent refinements are downgraded.
If Mumau disposed of camera movement, why
should we honor Ophuls? Since most of the
technical vocabulary, the zoom notwithstand-
ing, was established by the end of the silent
era, there has been a tendency to honor sound
films almost exclusively for social content. The
1958 Brussels poll, which may have been the
last gasp of the pyramid critics, cited only
three sound films out of the top twelve, and of

these three, La Grande Illusion and The Bi-
cycle Thief were clearly content selections
while Citizen Kane probably received mixed
support from its formal and political partisans.
(It might be noted that the recent Sight and
Sound poll reflected the rising influence of the
new French critics and film-makers.)

“The patent system of the pyramid generally
holds that silent directors invented forms while
sound directors perfected styles, and in the
pyramid histories, particularly those oriented
to realism, stylists are the drones of the cinema.
It might be charitable to suggest that stylists
are harder to analyze than inventors, and that
it at least seems easier to define Eisenstein than
to define Hitchcock. Actually, critics who are
superficial about Hitchcock are usually super-
ficial about Eisenstein as well.

“One problem with the pyramid approach
is that the base becomes rigid, and silent clas-
sics, especially, become encrusted with rever-
ential moss. It is then almost as difficult to
dislodge Pudovkin without disturbing Eisen-
stein as it is to move Stalin without compromis-
ing Lenin. Since new criticism is inevitably
revolutionary, new critics may find it useful to
smash the pyramid altogether and start with
what they know firsthand. Another hazard with
the pyramid is that deviations from the apex
are rejected even when acknowledged masters
are involved. Indeed, what is most striking
about pyramid histories is the number of direc-
tors who have allegedly declined, compromised,
sold out, retreated from reality, evaded respon-
sibility, and otherwise gone astray. Some direc-
tors, of course, decline by any standards. It
cannot be reasonably argued that Rene Clair in
1962 is equal to Rene Clair in 1932. What is
tiresome about pyramid critics is their tone of
moral outrage. In his Sequence attack on Hitch-
cock’s Hollywood films, Lindsay Anderson
seemed irritated even by the posh hotel Hitch-
cock patronized on his London visit. Perhaps
the most remarkable pyramid denunciation of
all time is Kracauer’s criticism of German direc-
tors for being too esoteric for the masses.

“What then is the alternative to the pyra-

30

THE AUTEUR THEORY

mid? I would suggest an inverted pyramid
opening outward to accommodate the unpre-
dictable range and diversity of individual direc-
tors. The time span of the cinema can then be
divided into the career spans of its directors,
each of whom is granted the option of a per-
sonal mystique apart from any collective mys-
tique of the cinema as a whole. The inverted
pyramid does not require a new manifesto.
Critics and film-makers have been moving in
that direction for the past decade. History as
biography is reflected in the increasing fre-
quency of director retrospectives and in the
popularization of director cults.”

There are many problems and paradoxes to
be considered with respect to the auteur theory.
At the very least, the auteur theory serves as a
convenient figure of speech. “Aimez-vous
Brahms?” asks the Saganesque seducer. “I don’t
like Bach, but I respect him,” observes the
Helen Hokinson woman in the New Yorker
record shop. For centuries, the Elizabethan
politique has decreed the reading of every
Shakespearean play before any encounter with
the Jonsonian repertory. In Jacques Rivette’s
Paris nous appartient, Jean-Claude Brialy asks
Betty Schneider if she would still admire Per-
icles if it were not signed by Shakespeare.
Giant computers are now working overtime to
determine if The Iliad and The Odyssey were
written by the same person. If not, our concep-
tion of each work would change. This is the
auteur tradition of Western Civilization, and
its application to the cinema tends to legitimize
the cinema’s cultural aspirations.

Susanne Langer has challenged this entire
tradition in her antipersonal tract on aesthetics,
Feeling and Form. For Miss Langer, the work
of an artist is transformed into an “art symbol,”
and this art symbol cannot be correlated with
the distinctive personality of the artist. Cer-
tainly, there is no immutable law in art which
decrees that the artist sign his work, or accept
responsibility for it. Japanese painters often
changed their names every five years or so
when they changed their styles. Much of the
art of antiquity Cannot be traced to individual
artists, but it is art just the same. What differ-

ence does it make then? To the artist none. To
the critic a great deal. The auteur theory is
ultimately a critical theory, and not a creative
theory. The artist does not worry about tech-
nical competence, personality, or interior mean-
ing, nor about imitating nature or the objective
correlative, nor about form and content. These
are all critical terms which enable critics to
interpret the works of artists for the benefit of
the (critics’) readers. The point of view of the
critic is always different from the point of view
of the creator. In the cinema, the critic sits
before the screen, and seeks to communicate
the glories of mise-en-sc&ne which appear be-
fore him. The director has no concern with
mise-en-scene, as such, because his point of
view takes him behind the screen to the various
technical stages of preparation. The director
must combine the elements of the illusion into
the illusion itself, and the critic must then
analyze the illusion for its constitutent ele-
ments, but this reciprocal process is never com-
pletely realized. A residue of manner and
meaning defies analysis. A barrier between
creator and critic will always remain as one of
the mysteries of art, and criticism can only
attempt an approximation of accuracy to in-
accuracy. There are exceptions to the auteur
theory, of course. The late Andre Bazin, Rich-
ard Roud, Ian Cameron, Manny Farber, and
other critics have probed some of the weak-
nesses in the theory. I would say at this point
only that the auteur theory comes closer than
any any other to providing sufficient informa-
tion on the meaning and style of the cinema.

Rather than continue an abstract argument I
would like to reprint here an article— “Italy’s
Big Four”— which I wrote in the summer of
1961 for Showbill as a practical application of
the auteur theory. Although the piece suffers
from compression and facility, it should suggest
the potential range of the auteur theory:

Of the one hundred and eighteen directors
now involved in the industrial renaissance of
Italian film-making, only four— Luchino Vis-
conti, Roberto Rossellini, Michelangelo Antoni-
oni, and Federico Fellini— seem destined for
more than the immortality of a footnote. Vis-

THE AUTEUR THEORY

31

conti and Rossellini have been directing feature
films for twenty years, Antonioni and Fellini
for ten, and the significant history of the Italian
cinema can be encompassed within these career
spans even though Italian filmmakers were
producing ambitious spectacles before Griffith’s
Birth of a Nation in 1915.

Because of freakish distribution problems,
Visconti’s Ossessione (1942) and Rossellini’s
Open City (1946) have been separately hon-
ored as the midwives of neorealism, an over-
defined movement which in its time and place
simply marked the rejection of the sanctimoni-
ous conventions of Fascism. The Italian cinema
before Ossessione is a mountain of spaghetti,
some of it reasonably tasteful, but most of it
too starchy for anything but home consump-
tion. Mussolini came to power more than a
decade before Hitler, and the crucially forma-
tive years of the 'twenties found Mumau, Lang,
Pabst and Lesser German directors evolving
their techniques under the relatively protective
aegis of the Weimar Republic while their Ital-
ian colleagues were marking time under II
Duce’s balcony.

Visconti at 64, Rossellini at 54, Antonioni at
48, and Fellini at 41 seem reasonably safe from
the creeping standardization which has afflicted
so many of their once promising colleagues.
One might except the late Curzio Malaparte,
whose one film, The Strange Deception , lent
the Italian cinema intellectual prestige at a
crucial point in its postwar development, and
on another level of deception, a special note
must be devoted to the inflated reputation of
Vittorio De Sica in the early ’fifties.

If Visconti and Rossellini invented neoreal-
ism in Ossessione and Open City, and then
invested it with the ultimate profundity of La
Terra Trema and Paisan, De Sica milked it dry
with Shoe-Shine and The Bicycle Thief. Lack-
ing an insight into the real world, De Sica
relied instead on tricks of pathos which he had
learned too well as an actor. It is unlikely that
any of the Big Four would have made the
Bicycle Thief in the De Sica-Zavattini manner.
Visconti would have catapulted his victim into
the Roman underworld where social corruption

and a sense of personal destiny would trans-
form the wronged laborer into a professional
bicycle thief. Rossellini’s character, heroically
transformed by God during the search, would
return home with the awareness that his integ-
rity as a human being was more important than
any material object. Antonioni’s hero, realizing
the futility of his isolated existence in an im-
personal society, would ride the recovered
bicycle off an embankment in a quasisuicidal
gesture. After some bizarre experiences, Fel-
lini’s protagonist would find his bicycle only to
have it stolen again the next day, but the hap-
less victim would come up smiling at the hope
radiated by a little girl playing a harmonica.

All four directors have diverged from the
literal path of neorealism which was never any-
thing more than the Stalinallee of social realism.
In Visconti’s work there has always been an
unreconciled tension between a Marxian vision
of society and an operatic conception of char-
acter. Rocco and His Brothers is comparable
in its contradictions to what might have come
out of a Verdi-Brecht adaptation of The Broth-
ers Karamazov. The unity of the family in
Rocco is destroyed partly because of the urban
pressures of Milan on the rural mystique of the
South, partly because of the inhumanly Christ-
like sanctity of Rocco, partly because of the
destructive intervention of a wilful prostitute,
and partly because of the fratricidal destiny of
the brothers. The disturbing homosexual over-
tones of Rocco (and Ossessione) reflect addi-
tional conflicts with which the director must
cope.

Throughout his career Visconti has been
haunted by the image of the destructive woman.
In the sublime cinema of Mizoguchi and
Ophuls, most notably in Ugetsu and Lola Mon-
ths, woman is presented as the Redeemer of
men, but for Visconti, she is man's nemesis.
The females in Ossessione, Senso, White Nights,
Bellissima, and Rocco wreak their havoc not
through spidery machinations but through a
psychic force which the male can neither resist
nor overcome. It follows almost logically that
Visconti is the best director of actresses in the
world, and the performances of Clara Calamai

32

THE AUTEUR THEORY

(Ossesstone), Anna Magnani (Bellissima), Alida
Valli (Senso), Maria Schell (White Nights ), and
Annie Girardot (Rocco) are among the most
memorable creations of the cinema.

Roberto Rossellini had directed three obscure
wartime films— La Nave Bianca , Un Pilote Ri-
torna , L’Uomo Della Croce— before he emerged
on the world scene with his neorealistic clas-
sics, Open City , Paisan , and Germany Year
Zero. Then he went into a Magnani-Cocteau
period with The Miracle , The Human Voice,
and The Infernal Machine before the advent
of Ingrid Bergman in Stromboli, Europa 51
(No Greater Love), Strangers, Joan at the
Stake, and Fear. During his Bergman period,
he also directed Flowers of St. Francis, Dove
La Liberia, an episode in The Seven Deadly
Sins (Envy), and We Are the Women (with
Bergman). Except for the brilliant, scandal-
provoking documentary, India, Rossellini was
off the screen for five years before making his
comeback with General Della Rovere, a patri-
otic success followed by Era Notte a Roma,
Stendhal's Vanina Vanini, and Viva Italia!

The most Catholic of all directors, Rossel-
lini has always been obsessed by the inner mir-
acles of human personality. In his oddly styl-
ized treatment of the Honneger-Claudel Joan
at the Stake, Rossellini sends Ingrid Bergman
awkwardly soaring into Heaven, a fitting cli-
max to his cinematic conversion of the acrress
into a saint. Rossellini has confronted death as
a metaphysical experience with none of the
histrionics of Visconti, the despair of Antonioni,
the emotional causality of Fellini. The final
death-images of Magnani in Open City, the
partisans in Paisan, the prostitute in Europa 51 ,
and De Sica in General Della Rovere possess
a formal dignity unique in world cinema. How-
ever, like most mystics, Rossellini sacrifies fact
for truth, and the ambiguities of the human
condition often elude him. With Chaplin and
Bunuel, he stands apart from the other artists
of his time, irritating, inimitable and indispen-
sable.

Next to Resnais, Antonioni is the most ab-
stract film-maker in the world today. The direc-

tor envisages the world as a chessboard on
which the kings and queens, the knights and
bishops of old have been replaced by pawns
whose moves are hopelessly confused by the
application of obsolete rules. His first film,
Cronaca di un Amore, focuses on two lovers
who are parted by the accidental deaths of a
friend and a husband, deaths willed but not
executed by the couple. Ever since, Antonioni
has been preoccupied with the shadow of guilt
which hovers over human relationships before
the police arrive. No director in history has
been as fascinated by the moral permutations
of suicides and fatal accidents. Hitchcock and
Bunuel have derived dark humor from this
casuistic problem which apparently torments
Antonioni.

However, Antonioni's films before VAvven-
tura— Cronaca di un Amore, La Signora Senza
Camelia, Le Amiche, 1 Vinti, II Grido— were
concerned also with problems arising from
class distinctions and economic calculations.
(The key to the directors treatment of the
relationship between men and women is stated
by a character in Le Amiche: “Every woman
who lives with a man to whom she is superior
is unhappy.”) VAvventura and La Notte de-
rive their maddening rhythm from the idea that
the duration of time drains away human emo-
tions, and their distinctive visual shape from
the suggestion that spatial forms create psy-
chological barriers. The unique aesthetic devel-
oped by Antonioni has led him to abandon the
lower and middle classes where lives are con-
stricted by necessity, and to concentrate on the
idle rich who have the time to torture each
other.

Fellini is the only one of the Four with a
flair for comedy, amply projected in his first
two films, Luci del Varieta (co-directed with
Lattuada) and The White Sheik. In a more
somber vein, I Vitelloni, La Strada, II Bidone,
and Cabiria are all bathed in a tragicomic
lyricism which is intensely personal and reflects
Fellini's compassion for the rejects of the mod-
em world. After this impressive tetralogy,
Fellini undertook in La Dolce Vita to provide

FILMS OF THE QUARTER

33

a Dantean vision of the modem world as
viewed from the top instead of the bottom.
Unfortunately, there is more to a great film
than a great conception, and Fellini has en-
larged his material without expanding his ideas.
Consequently, the film is as bloated as the fish
which terminates the orgy sequence.

However, it can be argued that in terms of
social impact, La Dolce Vita is the most impor-
tant film ever made. This does not imply a
correlation with artistic merit since by the
standard of impact, Uncle Toms Cabin is supe-
rior to Moby Dick. The fantastic popularity of
La Dolce Vita can be summed up in the
beggar’s comment in Bunuel’s Viridiana: “One
must sin before one can repent.” Without
being consciously hypocritical, Fellini has dra-
matized the fundamental injustices of social
morality. The poor creatures abandoned by
Antonioni to their lives of necessity flock to
La Dolce Vita to share Fellini’s disgust with
the sweet life, but the spectacle of corruption
fills them with envy for the options of the hero.
Confident of their ultimate righteousness, many
spectators would like to slide along the infernal
surfaces of -fur and chrome before regaining

their moral footing. If La Dolce Vita contrib-
utes to an awareness of the hypocrisy of
so-called social morality which denies to the
peasants and the proles the sweet Faustian
decisions of the Kennedys and the Rockefellers,
the film can be forgiven for its intellectual and
formal failures.

Although their aspiration often exceeds their
sensibility, the Big Four act as the conscience
of the Italian film industry. As a national bloc,
their most serious challengers active today are
the French Big Five of Renoir, Bresson, Res-
nais, Truffaut, and Godard. It would be diffi-
cult to find more than ten active directors
from the rest of the world on the same artistic
plane. At this moment, the Big Four are criti-
cally fashionable, but just a few years ago
their films were being hissed and booed on
three continents, and a few years from now,
they will probably be downgraded again. This
absurd oscillation of critical judgments is
caused largely by the haphazard system of dis-
tribution and revival in practice today. If there
is such a thing as ultimate judgment, only time
will tell if the Big Four are the wave of the
future or the last gasp of the past.

Films of the Quarter

Pauline Kael

Lawrence of Arabia is the most literate and
intelligent and tasteful and the most beautiful
of the modem expensive spectacle films that
I have seen, and I wish it had never been
made. There is a story that Greta Garbo, at a
screening of Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast,
watched the transformation of the Beast into
Prince Charming, and cried out “Give me back
my Beast.” I want my T. E. Lawrence back.

The treatment is on an exquisitely high level,
but the method and perhaps the intentions of
those who made the film are not so different
from the exploitation of historical and legend-

ary heroes in cruder epics. The trap they set
for the audience, baiting it with a figure
already famous, is, unfortunately, a trap we
can't get out of. We can’t cut the film off from
the interests and associations that have made
us go to see it. It is not the story of Joe Doakes
that has lured us into the theater, it is the
story of T. E. Lawrence. That’s what the pro-
ducers were counting on. But perhaps they
didn’t plan on some of the consequences. Inevi-
tably, in a film of this kind, a film that attempts
to justify its scale by biographical and histori-
cal pretensions, we use standards of historical
truth, as well as standards of dramatic content,
coherence, structure. Lawrence of Arabia not